Olivia Strittmatter - Ecology of Eden Chapter Twenty-One

 Blog Post 8 - Class Readings 4

Week 8

        This blog post is going to be about Chapter Twenty-One from Ecology of Eden by Evan Eisenberg. This chapter was in Part Three, titled Idylls. Part Three was all about the idyllic spaces that have been created between wilderness and culture, or nature and civilization. Some examples from previous chapters some of the Idylls included Arcadia, gardens, and suburbs.

Chapter Twenty-One was about the relationship between myth and science. It starts by talking about the Gaia Hypothesis, which is how the living organisms interact with each other and their inorganic surroundings to create a complex environment that is self-regulating and synergistic, in order to perpetuate conditions that are needed to maintain life on Earth. The first section talks about how Earth is a living organism. It discusses how Earth’s conditions have been relatively stable/constant over the past two billion years due to internal regulations. The next section, Daisyworld, talked about how the organisms on Earth are partially responsible for the internal regulation of the climate; they showed this by using black and white daisies. The third section discussed what's causing the relative stability of the Earth, and how that isn’t luck, that it’s a mechanism. Speaking of mechanisms, the next section, titled Mechanism, discussed how there are more than one mechanism that is controlling Earth’s ecosystems; they used some examples of temperature control mechanisms and negative feedback loops. The next section actually started discussing the combination of myth and science. This section was titled Gaia and Chaos, and it discussed how science and myth walk hand-in-hand; while science looks for precise statements and testable predictions, myth has much more symbolic imagery and flowing stories. This section also discussed how Gaia and Chaos are both aspects of nature, where Chaos is all of the aspects of nature that are excluded from Gaia. The next section, Not and Organism, Not a Mutualism, talks about the symbiosis between all organisms on Earth, and how these relationships are not inherently mutualistic; as well as how environments are shaped and changed by the life forms that are supported. The second to last section was titled Nature’s Folly, this section discussed how error is what causes evolution and diversity; where Chaos, death, evil, change, etc are all things that lead to diversity of organisms, and allow life to persist. The final section was called Complexity, it talked about how complex Earth’s systems are, and how people are looking for one simple mechanism that allows life to persist, but that there isn’t one mechanism, everything is so interconnected and complex that it’s impossible for there to only be one system.

Connecting Chapter Twenty-One to Part Three were three main parts that stood out to me. The first is that the Idylls mentioned in earlier chapters are idealized and overall unstable. The second is that Gaia is an attempt the recover a lost unity between man and wilderness, the examples were gardens, suburbs, and Arcadia. Finally the third was that the myth of Gaia is the same myth as the myth of the Mountain.